ARUN RATH, HOST:
A new website popped up recently that caught our eye. It's called The Museum of Four in the Morning.
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RATH: The site gathers clips of the seemingly endless pop culture references to 4:00 a.m., from movies to TV...
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RATH: ...to music.
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RATH: It's all been collected by this guy.
JOHN RIVES: It's probably safe to say that I'm one of the top 4 a.m. experts in the world.
RATH: That's John Rives. Everyone just calls him Rives.
RIVES: One, my collection must be among the top. And two, there's no second place, dude. You know what I mean? Like, it's me. I'm the guy.
RATH: Rives is a poet and performer. And the story starts in 2007 when he was invited to give a TED talk.
RIVES: And I thought, wow, what if I did a talk that was cockamamie? What if I was an expert on something that was inconsequential?
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RATH: Rives presented himself as an expert on 4 a.m. He pulled together examples from "The Simpsons" and Bill Clinton's autobiography, evidence of a 4:00 a.m. conspiracy.
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RATH: It was a joke, that's it. But when the TED talk went online, people started sending him more and more examples, some obvious ones like the Faron Young song...
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RATH: ...some esoteric.
RIVES: There's a book called "Grilled Cheese at Four in the Morning" for people with juvenile diabetes.
RATH: And then stuff Rives had never, ever heard of.
RIVES: Crochet Today magazine from the fall issue of a couple years ago with an adorable crocheted alarm clock which is clearly set at 4 o'clock.
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RATH: At first, it caught him off guard.
RIVES: This is crazy. What am I going to do with all this stuff? But then, I honestly started to get a major, major curatorial mojo.
RATH: Now he says there is something special about that hour, or at least the idea of it.
RIVES: Pretty clearly, it's the one time where you are either up too late or you've gotten up too early.
RATH: It's a popular shorthand across genres and even centuries.
RIVES: "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has three 4 a.m.-references. But Shakespeare's got four different plays with them, "Cymbeline," "Henry IV," "Richard III," "Measure for Measure."
RATH: We did a little digging of our own, and it wasn't hard to find references in the NPR archives.
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RATH: Rives says that now you've heard about the 4:00 a.m. phenomenon, you'll start to see it everywhere. And, he says, keep the submissions coming.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.